In the flag examples given, I agree they are almost all uniformly uninspired. The six- and eight-pointed stars must be clip art, and the flat, solid colors and geometric abstractions are boring. It says more about the lack of design education over the past 50 years than anything else.
But that Newton, Kansas, flag is excellent. I only know two things about Newton, Kansas, and that is they grow wheat and have trains. And I learned 100% of that from that flag.
> I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out?
It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0.
The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.
In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.
I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comments responding to that. All obvious bot accounts.
It's obvious on the channels, because these reply sets usually don't contain a lot of replies to comments (if there are any comment replies, it's almost always from the channel owner). It's so obvious, in fact, that I'm surprised YouTube hasn't done something to address it.
If the problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China, then I have some bad news about being a robot company. China is already farther ahead in both technology and volume of humanoid robots.[0][1][2][3]
Yes, people expect SCOTUS to rebuff Trump on the tariffs. [0]
Lately SCOTUS has been providing stricter textual interpretations of Constitutional questions. Many of these have aligned with Trump administration arguments based on the power of the executive as outlined in Article II. The text says, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," and, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.
One thing the Constitution is very clear on, though, is that only Congress can impose tariffs ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"). Furthermore, recent rulings of this Court have established the major questions doctrine, which says that even if Congress delegates the specifics of implementing its powers to the Executive branch, that delegation cannot be interpreted broadly. It can't be used to create new broad policies that Congress didn't authorize.
Therefore, because the text of the Constitution explicitly grants the right to impose tariffs to Congress /and/ Trump's imposition of tariffs is both very broad and very substantial, many people believe that SCOTUS will deny Trump's tariffs.
The case as argued is about Trump's right to issue tariffs under the IEEPA (a law Congress passed to give the President some ability to take economic actions due to international emergencies, which do not explicitly include tariffs), and there is some debate about what a negative ruling would mean for the return of tariffs to merchants who have paid them. Both of those points require careful consideration in the decision. Will the ruling limit itself to just tariffs issued under the IEEPA or to the President's ability to establish tariffs under other laws? If the Court rules against the tariffs, will the government be required to pay people back, and if so, to what extent? It's not surprising that the decision is taking some time to be released. There's a lot of considerations, and every one is a possible point for disagreement by the justices.
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
> What was the test for citizenship before the 14th amendment?
Basically, the same. Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor (1830) established:
The rule commonly laid down in the books is, that every person who is born within the ligeance of a sovereign is a subject; and, e converso, that every person born without such allegiance is an alien. . . . Two things usually concur to create citizenship; first, birth locally within the dominions of the sovereign; and secondly, birth within the protection and obedience, or in other words, within the ligeance of the sovereign. That is, the party must be born within a place where the sovereign is at the time in full possession and exercise of his power, and the party must also at his birth derive protection from, and consequently owe obedience or allegiance to the sovereign, as such, de facto.[0]
It excluded slaves and it excluded Native Americans. Native American US citizenship was established in 1924 by statute.[1]
This is not what's happening in these schools. Many children have no outside-of-school work -- at all. My two children have had many classes with no homework up through 8th grade. And this is in a highly regarded, very competitive school district.
From what I can tell, this is mostly a parent-led thing, well supported by overworked teachers who are more than willing to avoid even more work grading out-of-school assignments.
In fact, there's a significant market right now for purchasing FTX claims precisely because of this Anthropic investment. The bet is that you can buy the FTX claim for 35 or 40 cents on the dollar, and get 75 or 80 cents on the dollar if the Anthropic value gets unlocked during the bankruptcy process.
Yet, when we send our spacecraft from one planet to another, we lose a surprisingly high percentage of them (~7% since 2000, not counting the ones we purposefully crashed).
Look, I'm beyond skeptical of the claims, but it's not because the spacecraft shouldn't crash. The most likely time to lose an airframe is on takeoff or landing, not in between, so why wouldn't the aliens have problems once they reach their destination?
The companies spent all the money this year on R&D expenditures. That was cash out of their pocket (they spent it this year, so it reduced this year's cash on hand). The effect of the rollback is that they can now only count 20% of those expenditures to reduce their profits (and, by extension, their taxes) this year, so they are paying taxes this year on the remaining 80%. While yes, the profits are higher, the cash is not any higher, and cash pays the tax bill.
Note, this was not an "unexpected" change (it's been in the code), but it WAS unexpected that the provision was not extended.
Note that this affects not just startups. My wife's firm is a small, employee-owned, non-tech S-corp. This hit them as well. It resulted in tax bills for the shareholders approximately 25-30% greater than the firm's accountants expected them to be. The shareholders are on the hook for those higher taxes, although the company did the right thing and distributed extra cash to them to offset the higher taxes.
But that Newton, Kansas, flag is excellent. I only know two things about Newton, Kansas, and that is they grow wheat and have trains. And I learned 100% of that from that flag.